Hope y’all are doing well. Question for you because I’m sure I’m over simplifying this. Do leaks in consumer tech news matter? I started thinking they’re a bit of a detriment to the release day buzz. I don’t know. My thoughts:
leaks show product has this or doesn’t have that, so consumers decide to ignore the official announcement because the now have a guess at what’s coming
On the other hand, leaks can create a so-called “buzz” for a product. Although I think it’s pretty hard to create buzz for a phone or laptop these days. Just my opinion. Phones from 3-4 years ago still work quite well for MOST of the world population (excluding hardcore tech enthusiasts)
I’ve always thought the Pixel leaks were purposely done by team Google because their marketing has never had the hook its competitors have had when it comes to smartphones.
I’ve personally ignored the stories related to leaked/rumored features of the next phone or laptop or what have you because I’d like to see or hear the official announcement.
I guess the leaks are important for the speculative market and investors?
I guess the leaks are important for buzz for tech enthusiasts that’ll buy on day 1?
I don’t know. What are your thoughts? Granted I know most of you here are not your average consumer when it comes to tech. RAM, ROM, TPU, nanometers matter to a lot of you. But I think folks like Samsung and Apple are doing just fine at the cash register with customers who don’t know what memory or RAM is.
I apologize for typos or rambling thoughts. I didn’t proof read this. . . .
I think leaks just give the tech press something to fill the click-bait waves with. It’s not actually a feature, no matter how badly it leaks, until it’s something that is actually for sale and you can actually acquire it. Near as I can tell, the reason why Apple is so guarded against leaking (more or less unsuccessfully the last few years I might add) is that they view it as a competitive advantage. They don’t want their latest and greatest design or feature to get upstaged by Samsung or Google before they can claim they have “invented” it.
Like you said, it’s hard for me to form an unbiased opinion as an enthusiast. I really think they matter far less than enthusiasts might believe. It’s exciting in the moment, but at the end of the day the product gets released and it exists. The “normals” certainly don’t care until the product is available for purchase.
I believe most “leaks” are wholly intentional and meant to provide a form of free advertising. Either a company representative literally provides a media outlet with information, or a company has such lackadaisical security around a product (employees using the device in public) that some sort of leak is expected.
I feel like I’m a weird tech person. I don’t care about leaks, I don’t seek them out, I don’t not wanna know, I just feel like I’ll know when I know. I’m not usually buying a device based on a leak. At the end of the day, it’s still an iPhone, Mac, iPad, or whatever.
Leaks maybe matter more for investors. I actually find leaks a bit “annoying” because people love to use the word “confirmed” when I think to myself nothing can ever be confirmed before the manufacture says it
I woke up this morning thinking about this thread again and I think maybe I care more about software leaks. I don’t seek it out, but hearing about the next version of iOS is interesting. But it doesn’t do anything to my life. I’d much rather just see it from Apple at WWDC or Google from Jimmy Fallon
Definitely not all leaks are intentional. I know Nintendo went after an accessory maker because they used the leaks to showcase their accessories for the Switch 2, but at the time they did this, Nintendo had not announced anything yet (I think we didn’t even know the name was going to be Switch 2 yet, but I could be misremembering the timing). I’m guessing that company was one that shouldn’t have access to the data needed to make accessories that early, End result, after a lawsuit, that company can’t use official Switch 2 hardware in their marketing, which means if they need to show off how it interacts with the Switch 2 hardware, they need to create something that looks like it’s a Temu rip-off product.
My problem is that such leaks make up so much of the news cycle that important information falls under the radar.
Even with the launches themselves, people are so concentrated on the superficial side that the important changes barely get reported. The the iPhone 17s get a great new security feature, Memory Integrity Enforcement, it sounds truly amazing, yet everybody is reporting about how orange the new Pro is or that the titanium on the Air attracts fingerprints, not that the MIE has been implemented in hardware, that it takes up a significant amount of space on the chip and eliminates most of the common forms of attack on a computing device…
Agreed. I just scanned through the September 9 document from Apple Security Research. It was quite educational. I had no idea that this technology had initiated with ARM back in 2019. I especially like the fact that an illegal access causes an immediate crash in the app – whether or not the fault was through a synchronous or asynchronous failure. As Steve has noted many times on “Security Now!”, exploits are originally precipitated by crashes – until the exploiter can “tune” the bug to do something more subtle than crash the app. By always unconditionally crashing, the possibility of turning a buggy memory access into a live exploit is categorically reduced.
All things equal, there should also be plenty of state information in the crash dump to help pinpoint the bug.
It’s nice for these security researchers to get something to publicly brag about! I’m guessing this tech will be ported over to Mac apps in a future release.
